Precious And Fragile Things

It didn’t stop right away and for one panicked moment Gilly thought he was going to leave her behind. Then the red glare of the taillights came on, bathing everything in a horror-show haze. Once open, the gate wouldn’t close. Gilly pulled the sleeves of her jacket down over her palms to get a better grip and protect her hands, but that only made them slip worse. She tugged, hard, and fell on her ass.

The truck revved. Gilly got to her feet, slipping and sliding. He hadn’t stabbed her. He wasn’t going to drive away and leave her here to freeze, either. She ran anyway as best she could on frozen toes. Her fingers slipped again on the door handle. Gilly climbed back into the truck and slammed the door.

He drove for another thirty minutes along a road so twisted and potholed Gilly had to grip the door handle just to keep herself upright every time the truck bounced. Trees pressed in on them. Some branches even snaked out to scrape along the truck’s side. At one point, the battered driveway took a steep pitch upward. The tires spun on loose gravel. They were climbing.

At last, the man stopped the truck in front of a battered two-story house, bathing it in the twin beams of the bright headlights. House was too flattering a term. It was more like a shack. A sagging front porch with three rickety steps lined the front. Green rocking chairs, the sort with legs made from a single piece of bended metal, lined the porch. Gilly had seen chairs like that in 1950s pictures of her grandparents vacationing in the Catskills.

He turned off the ignition. Darkness clapped its hand over her eyes. Gilly blinked, momentarily blind.

“Get out,” the man said without preamble.

He opened the door and stepped into the glacial night air, then shoved the keys into the pocket of his ratty sweatshirt, slammed the door shut and headed toward the house without hesitation. He quickly blended into the dark.

Without the light of the headlamps to guide her, the distance from the truck to the front porch became instantly unnavigable. She already knew the ground here was frozen and hard. At best she’d fall on her ass again. At worst, she’d end up with a broken leg.

Gilly put her hand on the door. Tremors tickled her, and her fingers twitched on the handle. Her feet jittered on the duffel bag. Only her eyes felt wide and staring, motionless while the rest of her body went into some strange sort of Saint Vitus’ dance.

She was dreaming. Was she dreaming? Was this real? In the dark, the silent dark, Gilly had to press her twitching fingers to her eyelids to convince herself they were open. Like a blind woman she felt the contours of her face, trying to convince herself that it was her own and uncertain, in the end, if it was.

The slanting shack began to glow from the four windows along its front. The light was strange, yellow and dim, but it gave her the courage to open the door. The meager glow was just enough to allow Gilly to make her stumbling way to the front porch steps, and then through the door he’d left open.

She entered a small, square room with a sooty woodstove on a raised brick platform between the two windows along the back wall. Now she could see why the light coming from the windows seemed so odd. Propane, not electric, lights illuminated the room. She wrinkled her nose against the smell, which reminded her of summer camp.

Despite the stains and dirt on the carpet she could see it was indisputably green. Not emerald, not hunter, but mossy and dull. The color of mold. The furniture grouped around the woodstove was faded brown plaid with rough-hewn wooden arms and feet. The two long sofas facing each other across a battered coffee table looked in decent enough condition, but the two chairs beside them had seen better days. Time or rodents had put holes in the plaid fabric, and stuffing peeked out here and there. The scarred dining table had four matching chairs and a fifth and sixth that didn’t match the set or each other. Someone long ago had tried to make it pretty with an arrangement of silk flowers, now dusty and only sad. A larger camping lantern, newer than the wall sconces but unlit, also sat upon the table.

To her right Gilly saw the kitchen, separated from the living room by a countertop and row of hanging cabinets. Through the narrow gap between them she saw another table and chairs. Off the kitchen she thought there might be a mudroom or pantry. She glimpsed the man standing at the refrigerator, mumbling curses. Maybe at the emptiness, maybe at the stench of mildew and age that she could smell even from here.

Gilly closed the door behind her with a solid, remorseless thud.

“Smells like a damn rat died in the fridge.”

Gilly wasn’t positive he spoke to her or just at her. She swallowed her disgust at the thought and looked around the room again. Through the door immediately to her left she spied a linoleum floor and the glint of metal fixtures. A bathroom. The doorway farther back along the wall hinted at a set of steep, narrow stairs. That was it. Upstairs must be bedrooms.

“I need to take a piss,” he told her matter-of-factly. Carrying a large battery-powered lantern, he brushed past her and into the bathroom. Next came the sound of water gushing, then a toilet flushing. At least the facilities worked.

Her own bladder cramped, muscles that had never been the same since her pregnancies protesting. When he came out, she went in. He’d left her the lantern. She peed for what felt like hours. At the sink, washing her hands, a stranger peered out at her from the cloudy mirror. A woman with lank hair, dark to match the circles under her eyes, and skin the color of moonlight. She looked like her mother.

She’d run away just like her mother.

She tried for dismay and felt only resignation. Her eyes itched and burned, and not even splashing cold water helped. She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, her stomach lurching. She didn’t puke. Eyes closed, Gilly gripped the sink for one dizzy moment thinking she would open them and find herself at home in front of her own mirror, all of this some insane fantasy she’d concocted out of frustration. Wishful thinking. Maybe crazy would be better than this.

When Gilly came out of the bathroom, she found the man sitting at the dining room table. He’d lit the lamp there and spread out a bunch of wrinkled papers. He held his head in his hands like the act of reading them all had given him a headache.

Gilly cleared her throat, then realized she hadn’t used her voice since they’d stopped for gas. Four, five hours ago? Less than that or longer, she had no idea. She waited for him to look up, but he didn’t.

He ran his fingers again and again through the dark lengths of his hair, until it crackled with static in the cold air. Gilly waited, shifting from foot to foot. Awkward, uncertain. Even if she did speak, what could she possibly say?

He looked up. Under the thin scruff of black beard, his face had fine, clean lines. Thick black lashes fringed his deep brown eyes, narrowed now beneath equally dark brows. He wasn’t ugly, and she couldn’t force herself to find him so. With a shock, Gilly realized he wasn’t much younger than she was, maybe three or four years.

“My uncle,” he said suddenly, looking up at her.

Gilly waited for more, and when it didn’t come she slipped into one of the battered chairs. She folded her hands on the cold wood. It felt rough beneath her fingers.

He touched the pile of papers, shoving a couple of them toward her. “This was my Uncle Bill’s place.”

Gilly made no move to take the papers. She found her voice, as rusty as the gate had been. “It’s…quaint.”

His brow furrowed. “You making fun of me?”

She expected anger. More knife waving. Perhaps even threats. Anger she could handle. Fight. She could be angry in response. Instead she felt hollow shame. He’d spoken in the resigned fashion of a man used to people mocking him, and she had been making fun.

“Was it a hunting cabin?”

“Yeah.” He looked around. “But he lived here, too. Fixed it up a little at a time. I used to come here with him, sometimes. Uncle Bill died a couple months ago.”

Condolences rose automatically to her lips and she pressed them closed. It would be ridiculous to express sorrow over a stranger’s death, especially to this man. Her fingers curled against the table. Surreal, all of this.

You’re not dreaming this, Gilly. You know that, right? This is real. It’s happening.

She knew it better than anything and yet still couldn’t manage to process it. She stared across the table. “He left you this cabin?”

“Yeah. It’s all mine now.” He nodded and gave her a grin shocking in its rough beauty, its normality. They might’ve been chatting over coffee. This was more terrifying than his anger had been.

She looked around the room, like maybe it might look better with another glance. It didn’t. “It’s cold in here.”

He shrugged, pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt down over his fingertips and hugging his arms around himself. “Yeah. I could light a fire. That’ll help.”

“It’s late,” Gilly pointed out. She’d been about to say she needed to go to bed, but she didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Fear flared again as she watched him run his tongue along the curve of his smile. He was bigger than she was and certainly stronger. She wouldn’t be able to stop him from forcing her.

“Yeah” was all he said, though, and made no move to leap across the table to ravish her. He blinked, cocking his head in a puppyish fashion that might have been endearing under other circumstances. “Let’s go to bed.”

Stricken, Gilly didn’t move even when he pushed away from the table and gestured to her. Her throat dried. Lie back and enjoy it, she thought irrationally, remembering what a friend of hers had said a blind date gone horribly wrong had told her to do. Gilly’s friend had kicked the would-be rapist in the nuts and run away, but Gilly had given up the chance for running back at the gas station. Even if she ran, now, where would she go?

He went to the propane lamps and lowered the flames to a dim glow, then jerked his head toward the steep, narrow stairs. “Beds are upstairs. C’mon.”

On wobbly legs she followed him. She’d been right about the stairs. Dark, steep, narrow and splintery. Festooned with cobwebs and lit only by the lantern he carried.

The stairs entered directly into one large room that made up the entire upstairs. More propane sconces, wreathed in spiderwebs furry with dust, lined the walls beneath the peaked roof. The windows on each end were grimy with dirt and more cobwebs. A waist-high partition with a space to walk through divided the room in half widthwise. A low, slatted wall protected unwary people from falling down the stairs.

“Beds.” He pointed. “You can have the one back there.”

He meant beyond the partition. Gilly realized he didn’t intend to follow her when he handed her the lantern. She passed the double row of twin beds, three on each side of the room, then went through the open space in the middle of the partition. On the other side were a sagging full-size bed, a dresser, an armoire and an ancient rocking chair. A faded rag rug covered the wooden plank floor.

“Cozy,” she muttered and set the lantern on the dresser.

The man had already crawled into one of the beds on the other side. Gilly, mouth pursed with hesitant distaste, pulled back the heavy, musty comforter. The sheets beneath were no longer white, but still fairly clean. Nothing rustled in them, at least nothing she could see.

She unlaced her useless boots and slipped them off with a sigh, wriggling her toes. She hadn’t realized how much they hurt until she took off her boots. Without removing her coat, Gilly crawled into bed and pulled the knobby cover up to her chin. The thought of putting her head on the pillow made her cringe, and she pulled her hood up to cover her hair.

His voice came at her out of the dark. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Gillian. Gilly.”

“I’m Todd.”

She heard the squeak of springs as he settled further into the mattress. Then exhaustion claimed her, and she fell asleep.

4

What finally woke Gilly was not a warm body burrowing next to hers and the stench of an overripe diaper. Nor was it the sudden blaring of a television tuned permanently to the cartoon channel. What woke her this morning was the numbness of her face.

She hadn’t slept without nightly interruption for more than five years but now her eyes drifted open slowly. Gradually. Bright morning sunshine dimmed by the dirt on the window glass filled the room. She’d rolled herself into the covers, cocooned against the bitter winter air. Her hood, pulled up around her hair, had kept her head warm enough. Her face, though, had lain exposed all night. She couldn’t feel her cheeks or her nose or her lips.

The night rushed back at her. Her heart thumped, and her mouth behind the frozen lips went dry. Gilly sat up in the sagging double bed, fighting to untangle the covers that had protected her through the night.

She managed to push them off. On stiff legs she got out of bed and hugged her coat around her. Her boots were gone.

Everything in the dusty attic room shone with an unreal clarity that defied the fuzziness of her thoughts. How long had she slept? The sudden, panicked thought she might have slept for more than just one night, that she’d been gone for days, forced her into action.

In the light of day she could no longer take solace in the dark to hide her actions, to excuse her decisions. She’d made a terrible mistake last night. She could only hope she had the chance to fix it.

Gilly pounded down the stairs, breath frosting out in front of her. She hurtled into the living room and stumbled over her own feet. She caught herself on the back of the hideous plaid sofa.

From the kitchen, Todd swung his shaggy brown head around to look at her from his place at the stove. “You all right?”

She didn’t miss the irony of his concern. “Yeah. Thanks.”

By the time she walked across the living room and entered the kitchen, her stomach had begun to grumble like thunder. The last thing she’d eaten was half a granola bar Arwen had begged for and then refused because it had raisins in it. Gilly swallowed against the rush of saliva.

“Hungry?” A cigarette hung from Todd’s mouth and wreaths of smoke circled his head. He lifted a spatula. “I’m making breakfast. Take your coat off. Stay awhile.”

Gilly wrinkled her nose at the stench of smoke and didn’t laugh at what he’d obviously meant to be funny. With her stomach making so much noise she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t hungry, though she didn’t want to admit it. “I’m cold. What time is it?”

Todd shrugged and held up a wrist bare of anything but a smattering of dark hair. “Dunno. I don’t have a watch.”

Her stomach told her she’d slept well past eleven. Maybe even past noon. It grumbled again, and she pressed her hands into her belly to stop the noise.

Gilly looked around the kitchen. The propane-powered appliances were old, like the chairs on the porch, straight out of the 1950s. Green flowered canisters labeled Flour, Coffee, Sugar and Tea, and a vintage table and chairs set stuck off in one corner prompted her to mutter, “You could make a fortune on eBay selling this stuff.”

Todd swiveled his head to look at her again. “What?”

“Nothing.”

From the stove in front of him came the sound of sizzling and the smell of something good. A wire camping toaster resting on the table held two slices of bread, a little browner than she preferred. Her stomach didn’t seem to care.

“Toast,” Todd said unnecessarily. He pointed with the spatula. “There’s butter and jelly in the fridge.”

All this as casual as coffee, she thought. All of this as though there was nothing wrong. She might’ve woken at a friend’s house or a bed and breakfast. She shuddered, stomach twisting again. She fisted her hands at her sides, but there was nothing she could grab on to that would stop the world from turning.

“Christ, move your ass! Put it on the table,” Todd said, voice prompting as if she was an idiot.

She jumped. The command got her feet moving, anyway. Not from fear—he didn’t sound angry, just annoyed. More a point of pride, that she wasn’t so scared of him she couldn’t move, or so stupid she couldn’t figure out how to eat breakfast.

Remembering his comments the night before, Gilly hesitated to open the refrigerator. She expected to recoil from the smell of dead rodents and had one hand already up to her nose in preparation. The interior of the appliance was not sparkling; age would prevent that from ever being true again. But it was clean. The caustic but somehow pleasant scent of cleanser drifted to her nostrils. Food filled every shelf, crammed into every corner. Jugs of milk and juice, loaves of bread, packages of bologna and turkey and deli bags of cheese. The freezer was the same, bulging with packages of ground beef and chicken breasts. No vegetables that she could see, but plenty of junk food in brightly colored boxes, full of chemicals and fat. The sort of food she bought but felt guilty for serving.

“You went shopping.”

“Even bastards gotta eat,” Todd said.

Gilly pulled out the jumbo-size containers of jelly and margarine, not real butter, and set them on the table. She shifted on her feet, uncertain what to do next. She wasn’t used to not being the one at the stove. The bare table beckoned, and she opened cupboards in search of plates and cups, pulled out a drawer to look for silverware. The tiny kitchen meant they needed complicated choreography to get around each other, but she managed to set the table while Todd shifted back and forth at the stove to give her room to maneuver.

When at last she’d finished and stood uncertainly at the table, Todd turned with a steaming skillet in one hand. “Sit down.”

Gilly sat. Todd set the skillet on the table without putting a hot pad underneath it, but Gilly supposed it wouldn’t matter. One more scorch mark on the silver-dappled white veneer would hardly make much of a difference.

Todd scooped a steaming pile of eggs, yellow interspersed with suspicious pink bits, onto her plate. Gilly just stared at it. She smelled bacon, which of course she wouldn’t eat, and which of course he couldn’t know.

Instead she spread her browned toast with a layer of margarine and jelly and bit into it. The flavor of it burst on her tongue, igniting her hunger. She gobbled the rest of the bread and left only crumbs.

A teakettle she hadn’t noticed began to whistle. Todd left the table to switch off the burner and pull two chipped mugs from one of the cupboards. Into each he dropped a tea bag and filled the mugs with the boiling water, then pushed one across the table at her.

He took his chair again and settled into the act of eating as naturally as if he’d known her all their lives. He ate with gusto, great gulps and lip smacking. His fork went from the plate to his mouth and back again, with little pause. Watching him, Gilly was reminded of the way their dog crouched over his bowl to keep the cat from stealing the food. Her stomach shriveled in envy. One piece of toast wasn’t going to be enough.

He paused in his consumption long enough to look up at her. “You not eating? There’s plenty. I made extra.”

The sudden loud gurgle of her stomach would make her a liar if she said no. “Maybe some more toast.”

The smooth skin of his brow furrowed. “You don’t like eggs?”

Gilly pointed to the skillet. “Ah…they’ve got bacon mixed in with them.”

Todd licked his lips. The gesture was feral and wary, as though she was trying to trick him and he knew it, but wasn’t sure how to stop her. “Yeah?”

“I don’t eat bacon,” Gilly explained. Her stomach gurgled louder. She’d no more eat the breakfast he’d cooked than she would kick a puppy, but the smell was making her mouth water.

“Why not?”

“I’m Jewish,” she said simply. “I don’t eat pork.”

Todd swiped his sweatshirt sleeve across his lips. “What?”

Gilly was used to having to explain herself. “I don’t eat bacon. I’m Jewish.”

Todd looked down at his plate and shoved the last few bites of pig-tainted eggs around with his fork. When he looked up at her, she noticed his eyes were the same shade as milk chocolate. “You don’t look Jewish.”

The comment, so ripe with anti-Semitism, was one she’d heard often and which never ceased to rankle. “Well, you don’t look crazy.”

He cocked his head at her, again lining the rim of his lips with his tongue. From any other young man the gesture might have been sensual or even aggressively, overtly sexual. On Todd, it merely made him look warily contemplative. Like a dog that’s been kicked too many times but keeps coming to the back door, anyway. Mistrustful, waiting for the blow, but unable to stop returning.

“Uncle Bill always made the eggs that way up here,” he said finally. “He called them camp eggs. But I can make you some without bacon, if you want.”

She wanted to deny him that kindness, to keep him as the villain. Her stomach gurgled some more, and she couldn’t. “I’ll make them.”

She pushed away from the table, heat stinging in her cheeks. Why should she feel guilty? He was the bad guy. He’d held a knife on her, kidnapped her, stolen her vehicle. Put her kids in danger.

“Can you use this skillet, or…” His voice trailed off uncertainly from behind her. “Or do you need one that didn’t have pig in it?”

Again she thought of a kicked dog, slinking around the back door hoping for a moment of kindness, and the heat burned harder in her face. That she doubted there was any utensil in this cabin that hadn’t at some point touched something non-kosher didn’t really matter. He was trying to be considerate. This, like his concern when she’d tripped, was scarier than if he’d shouted and threatened. This made him…normal.

And if he was normal, what did that make her?

“No, I can just wash it out. That one will be fine.”

He scraped the remains of the skillet onto his plate and handed it to her. She washed it, then opened the fridge and pulled out the cardboard carton of eggs. She opened two cupboards before she found a bowl and rinsed it free of any dust that might have gathered. She cracked the first egg into it, checking automatically for blood spots that would make it inedible.

The skin on the back of her neck prickled. He was watching her, and of course. What else would he look at but this woman in his kitchen, a stranger he’d stolen? Gilly broke another egg with crushing fingers, bits of shell falling into yellow yolk.

“How long have you been Jewish?”

It wasn’t the question she’d expected. “My whole life.”

Todd laughed. “I guess that’s about how long I’ve been crazy.”

Crazy.

She’d thrown out the term offhandedly, the way most people did, not meaning it. The way Todd had, himself. His tone had told her he didn’t think he was crazy. Not really. Gilly didn’t think he was crazy, either. Gilly knew crazy.

Crazy was having a chance to escape and ignoring it, not just once, but many times. Crazy was wanting to escape in the first place.

Her stomach lurched into her throat, bile bitter on the back of her tongue. She swallowed convulsively. She wasn’t hungry anymore. She beat the eggs anyway and poured them into the skillet along with some margarine. The smooth yellow mess curdled and cooked. Gilly knew she wouldn’t be able to eat it now no matter how hollow her stomach. She removed the eggs from the stove and turned off the flame.

She sipped in a breath, forming her words with care, keeping her tone light and easy. Casual as coffee. “Where are we, by the way?”

“My uncle’s cabin. I told you last night.”

Keeping her back to him, Gilly gripped the edge of the counter. “No. I mean…where are we? We drove a long time. I fell asleep. I don’t know where we are.”

A beat of silence. Then, “I’m not telling you. Jesus, you think I’m stupid enough to do that?”